Saturday, 19 December 2015

Book review: The Eye of the World

The Eye of the World is yet more fantasy trash I read in Waterstones. It is a pretty thick book all by itself, but is only the first volume in an n volume series. Having ploughed through it I decided by the end that I enjoyed it; but when I started on volume two I realised I was bored and stopped.
All in all, it is too cliched, in a genre prone to that. The Dark Lord, sealed by some cataclysm, and yet leaking out. The Young Heroes from a distant shire, helped by people who turn out to be far more important than they thought. And so on. It felt like he'd used up all his ideas, thin as they were, in volume one; and was unlikely to do more.

It's clear that he's trying to build a massive, detailed world, but it's not an interesting, original world. It wouldn't be so bad if the lengthy asides were interesting, in and of themselves. If each little piece was amusing in its own right, we might forgive. But instead, we get dry, lengthy explanations of extraneous facts that we have no reason to be curious about.

To be fair, another review also says something of what I found, in that whilst somewhat unoriginal it can be a fun read.